Standardized testing is prevalent in the United States today. Such testing is used for higher education entrance examinations and achievement testing at the primary and secondary school levels. The prevalence of standardized testing in the United States has been further bolstered by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which emphasizes nationwide test-based assessment of student achievement.
Traditional multiple-choice assessment examinations contain one or more sections, each including a series of test items. An assessment examination presents several answer choices (i.e., A, B, C, D, etc.) for each test item. An examinee is instructed to determine the best answer from the set of choices and indicate his or her choice on an answer sheet.
Numerous educational assessments include a writing component. Some tests, such as the SAT® test (a college-entrance examination) and the GMAT® test (a business-school entrance examination) assess writing proficiency by eliciting a sample of the examinee's writing directly by, for example, requiring completion of a “constructed-response” task. Other tests, such as the GRE® test (a graduate school examination), the TOEIC® test (Test of English for International Communication), and the PRAXIS™ test (a teacher proficiency examination) assess writing (or verbal skills more generally) through test items aimed at particular aspects of grammar, usage and/or vocabulary. Questions on such tests are generally either multiple-choice items or free-response items based on a single sentence. For example, the examinee might be asked to fill in an appropriate word for a blank inserted in a sentence.
Typically, test items are generated manually once test developers determine that a test requires a certain number of items. Items can be generated to test for comparative construction usage, pronoun usage, redundant word usage, and the like. Upon creating such test items, the items are often pre-tested to determine each item's difficulty level empirically.
Accordingly, item development can be a slow process. Currently, test developers must think of a scenario in which to embed relevant grammatical material. Then, the developers must determine the particular phrasing to use. For example, in the case of items which test an examinee's use of the comparative, the developers might have to decide whether an item will test comparative adjectives or nouns (i.e., more forgetful vs. more cheese) and whether to use the morphological or periphrastic form of the comparative (i.e., faster vs. more quickly). Finally, test developers must determine an appropriate set of distractor responses for the item.
What is needed is a method and system for more quickly generating test items that test aspects of grammar, usage, and/or vocabulary.
A need exists for an application that searches corpora for existing sentences that might be suitable for sentence-based test items.
A further need exists for an application that generates natural-sounding, rather than stilted, test items.
The present invention is directed to solving one or more of the above-listed problems.